A/Prof Rick Macourt On Disrupting Inequitable Economic Systems To Advance First Nations Prosperity

Associate Professor Rick Macourt is a proud queer Gumbaynggirr man, lawyer, and leading economic strategist dedicated to advancing the prosperity of First Peoples. As Managing Director (Strategy and Foundation) at First Nations Economics and Associate Dean of First Nations Strategy and Services at the University of Sydney, Rick brings a bold and visionary approach to systemic change.

With over 15 years of experience spanning government, corporate, and non-profit sectors, Rick has led major reforms at the highest levels. As Director of First Nations Expenditure and Outcomes at NSW Treasury, he pioneered the state's first Indigenous expenditure reporting and spearheaded the groundbreaking First Nations budget process in 2021–22 — setting a national benchmark.

Before this, Rick shaped First Nations strategy at Westpac Group and held influential roles with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, City of Sydney, and Standards Australia, with deep expertise in negotiation, policy, and evaluation.

A published author with Oxford University Press, Rick also serves on the First Nations Advisory Board of Siemens Australia and is a Non-Executive Director at Barnardos Australia. He is widely respected for his integrity, strategic insight, and unwavering commitment to First Nations economic empowerment.

Associate Professor Macourt discusses how Indigenous-led governance models can disrupt traditional systems of economic development, the importance of self-determination in policymaking, and how shifting power to communities is key to closing the gap.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in economics and advancing the prosperity for First Nations people?

[A/Prof Rick Macourt] - Growing up in community I saw firsthand the challenges many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people face as they try to navigate their careers and their lives in this country.

I realised quickly that in order for us to have an equal start in life, we need to take self-determination of our economic futures into our own hands. This means working within systems that weren’t necessarily built to be inclusive of our communities, but making sure that our stories, our narratives, our ways of doing business, and our knowledge is better encapsulated in the analysis, studies, and research conducted about us.

It’s about ensuring we ourselves have a direct hand in the way data and information is translated, and making sure our communities are the true beneficiaries of economic development.

Ultimately, there is huge disadvantage that First Nations people face within Australia, and there is still so much work to be done to really close that gap. Can you please share more about the work you’re doing with First Nations Economics?

First Nations Economics is now a medium-sized charity. We’ve grown a little over the last couple of years, and we are dedicated to walking alongside First Peoples towards their social, cultural, and economic prosperity.

Having left government and taken up a role at the university, I was in a privileged position to reflect on how I personally wanted to make my mark and make a difference. Having worked with my co-managing director (Sean) at the NSW Treasury, we realised that many of the systems reforms we had been working on inside government were desperately needed. But more than that, it was essential to engage with communities to ensure those models and ways of doing business reflected how communities actually operate.

Take the federal government’s Indigenous Procurement Policy, for example. There are many opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses to get a foot in the door. However, just like our communities have always been governed by Elders and senior people who hold knowledge and care for our people, we felt that instead of creating a for-profit model where shareholders are the ultimate beneficiaries, we needed to disrupt the system itself.

We created a Public Benevolent Institution (a charity) that better reflects the governance and ways of doing business that have been alive on this continent for 85,000 years. A charitable structure means that as an organisation we can’t be bought or sold, and at the end of the financial year, we can’t make a profit. Ultimately, we are accountable back to the communities we seek to serve.

We were very purposeful in pulling together a majority Aboriginal female board to reflect the guidance we felt was most needed. We also built a majority Aboriginal team with experience across management, consulting, monitoring, and evaluation. I think we’re competitive with the big consulting firms, but we are changing the landscape by saying, we’ll do the work. We’ll stand alongside KPMG and EY. We’ll compete on cost-benefit analysis, but instead of doing it the way government has done for the last 250 years, we’ll sit down with community, listen to their stories, and build in the narratives they believe are important.

Unlike our non-Indigenous colleagues, we won’t sit behind a desk piling data together. We’ll go out to community, engage with people in a culturally safe way, on their Country, to ensure the work we are doing accurately records the power of their stories.

What ends up happening in that process is that our personalised, culturally safe approach, one that takes us out into communities, provides richer, more beneficial data sources that ultimately create better products. We’re then able to better justify investment in programs and services that create real impact for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

We also have a strong due diligence model. As a charity not reliant on government funding, we can choose the work we commit to. For us, that means everything we take on must have a net positive impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. No matter how big the commercial opportunity, if it’s not leaving our communities in a better place than where we found them, then we’re not interested.

We ensure that self-determination and Aboriginal governance are embedded in every single thing we do. That can be uncomfortable for some of our clients and government agencies who are essentially paying for a project to be delivered. We turn around and say, “We’re happy to take this on, but we’re going to ask that you step away from the decision-making seat, that you step out of your position of power, and transfer that power back to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities so they can make decisions about what happens in their own communities.”

That due diligence ensures a transfer of power which aligns with Priority Reform One of Closing the Gap. We’re not just talking about creating a difference, we’re actually doing it.

The last thing I’d mention is while the commercial side of our business allows us to attract clients and deliver meaningful projects that otherwise wouldn’t have an Aboriginal voice embedded, we don’t operate like a for-profit business. Instead of generating profits for shareholders, we redirect 100% of our surpluses back into the economic development of Indigenous communities. We do this in a couple of ways.

We have a strong pro bono program. For every contract or job we do for government, we’re able to offer like-for-like services back to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations either for free or at low bono rates. This ensures they have access to the very same resources government relies on when it comes to securing investment in the programs and services they want to see delivered.

We’re also proud of our Leah Armstrong Scholarship. We currently have four scholars (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women) who we’ve supported through university. These women are passionate about working in the business and economic space and are already making a difference. We deliberately named the scholarship in honour of Leah Armstrong, a trailblazing Torres Strait Islander businesswoman, to continue her legacy of empowering the next generation of deadly Black women. It’s about ensuring they take their rightful place in history, step into their power, and make a difference not only in their own lives but also in their communities.

We’re deeply passionate about education and training. Having had the privilege of tertiary education ourselves, we recognise many of our people aren’t afforded the same opportunities. So when we work with communities, we make sure to pass on the skills we were employed to use in the first place.

We ensure communities understand what we’re doing, that they’re able to give their free, prior, and informed consent, and that they know how their voices and data will be used. Just as importantly, we make sure that when we walk away at the end of a project, we’ve transferred some of those skills and knowledge so that communities themselves can continue operating in that space. That kind of capability building is absolutely essential if we’re to see real and lasting differences in our communities.

As a speaker at the upcoming Social Enterprise World Forum in Taipei, which takes place this year on the 29th and 30th of October, what are you most looking forward to about SEWF 2025?

I think one of the things we’ve realised over the last three years of operating First Nations Economics is that the principles guiding our work are not restricted to Australia.

When I talk about free, prior, and informed consent, that’s an incredibly important procedure in international law. It ensures that when you’re engaging with First Peoples, whether that’s in Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, or the United States, you seek consent in a way that values self-determination and ensures communities are privy to all the information they need before making an informed decision.

Similarly, Indigenous data sovereignty has emerged through international work. It asserts that First Peoples should retain ownership rights over the data they contribute, whether to government, corporate, or other spaces. Even when those stories and data are shared, sovereignty over that information remains with the community.

In working in this space, where we seek to uphold the fundamental rights of First Peoples, we quickly realised the lessons we were learning and the examples we were creating weren’t just relevant in Australia. We felt strongly that if we were achieving success here and beginning to shift the policy landscape, then it was important to take those lessons to colleagues across the world. Like our First Peoples, they face challenges, share similar stories, and grapple with disparities in social, cultural, and economic wellbeing.

It would be remiss of us not to share our experiences, and we were thrilled to be invited to speak at SEWF. Personally, I’m really excited to visit Taipei for the first time, to immerse myself in the local culture, and, importantly, to learn. My hope is to take back insights and lessons from other jurisdictions and apply them here in Australia.

What barriers have you experienced in getting this First Nations-led organisation up and running, and where do you see opportunities to better support similar organisations and leaders?

I was in a really privileged position. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I was removed from my family and taken to boarding school in Sydney. I became the beneficiary of a world-class education, even though it came with its downfalls of being separated from community and culture. It was incredibly tough being away from family and placed in a very white-dominated, privileged environment.

But it also gave me access to networks and opportunities not afforded to many. Because of that, I’ve been fortunate to build a successful career that’s taken me around the world and allowed me to do some incredible things.

When it came time to leave government, I realised there was an opportunity to take the knowledge I had gathered throughout my career and apply it in a way that better reflected how our communities work. In creating First Nations Economics, we wanted to disrupt the system and create a resource that walked the line between government and community.

One of the challenges we face, particularly in the context of Closing the Gap, is funding. In New South Wales alone, more than $1.2 billion is spent on Indigenous peoples. At a federal level, that figure has been estimated at $32 billion. Yet, in doing our expenditure reporting, we quickly realised that this is largely a myth.

That $1.2 billion in NSW is, in the majority, not touched by Indigenous people. Around 75% of it is not self-determined, not channelled through community-controlled organisations. Instead, it’s delivered by government to government. Even more concerning is that 65% of all that funding has never been evaluated to determine whether it’s achieving the outcomes it claims.

That’s why we created an organisation that could work differently, an organisation that sits with community.

As Aboriginal people, the beneficiaries of culture and practices, we can create genuine, trusting, and respectful relationships that give us access to knowledge, ways of doing business, and information that others can’t reach. Drawing on my government experience, we translate that information back into the forms government wants to see, things like cost-benefit analyses and business cases that are rooted in community voice. Essentially, we act as a translation service, because we know our communities hold the keys and the solutions to the challenges they identify for themselves.

First Nations Economics simply walks alongside them to help translate that knowledge into a form that government will listen to. The result is often greater investment in services, stronger control for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled organisations, and a greater voice in policymaking.

What would your tips be for other purpose-driven leaders who are looking to start up and get something going?

For me, the biggest challenge at the beginning was ego. I think it’s something we all struggle with. Having been an executive in government, it’s easy to think, “I know this space. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got the skills and knowledge.”

But what I learned is that 15 to 20 years of working in this space is just a drop in the ocean compared to the knowledge our communities hold. When I sit down with Elders, listen to their stories, and hear how their work is having a positive impact, I quickly realise that I’m not the knowledge holder. I’m not the expert. I’m the translator. I’m the one who listens and helps bridge that knowledge into a different space.

That can be tough to accept, the fact that you don’t have all the answers and you can’t do everything yourself. But it’s a lesson that has carried through into business as well.

When I started First Nations Economics, I had no experience running my own organisation. I’d never started anything from scratch. I had experience in finance, budgeting, and people management, but running an organisation is so much more than that. It’s about creating a culture and bringing together a group of like-minded people who are united by passion and want to drive outcomes.

When you’re delivering programs, it can feel straightforward, but you can’t forget the less glamorous side of running a small organisation. You still need to do the payroll, the admin, the policies, the HR support, all of the back-end that keeps the work sustainable.

I approached this with a lot of trepidation, but also with honesty about my own skills, gaps, and areas I needed to improve. I learned very quickly that the only reason I’ve been able to succeed is because I partnered with communities, and I partnered with Shaun, a colleague who shares the same passion.

I’ve been able to bring together incredible people who have taught me so much, whether that’s the consultants working directly with communities or our community impact team driving our pro bono work. Every single day I learn something new, and I grow.

I’ve come to understand that First Nations Economics is so much bigger than me and Shaun. It’s bigger than our current workforce. In creating a Public Benevolent Institution, my hope has always been to build a legacy, something we can pass on to the next generation so they can cut their teeth in this space, drive outcomes, and do so in a culturally safe environment.

Being surrounded by people who care about the same things, who want to see change and make a difference, makes running a business so much easier. It lightens the load because you realise you have a network of support, people who not only care about the work you’re doing but also genuinely care about you, your wellbeing, and your success.

I’ve been really lucky to have amazing people support me along this journey. The truth is, without community support, we would lack cultural legitimacy. Our entire business model rests on our reputation. If community doesn’t believe we’re doing the job we should be doing, we lose our legitimacy, and we won’t be invited back to continue the work. Listening to our communities isn’t just fundamental to what we do, it’s make or break.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive change?

There are a few organisations we’re really close with. One of the things that made me nervous about creating an organisation was the idea of competitiveness. I’m not someone who enjoys competing when, at the end of the day, all I want is to make a difference. I don’t think there’s really a place for competitiveness in our communities. Instead, we band together, we partner, we collaborate.

When we created First Nations Economics, the very first thing we did was sign an MOU with First Nations Foundation. They’re an incredible Indigenous financial charity that helps communities recover lost superannuation, provides tax support, and delivers financial literacy and budgeting programs. Together, we created the Leah Armstrong Scholarship.

Of course, Leah herself is a founding director of First Australians Capital, another First Nations financial organisation and charity focused on creating opportunities for our communities to access capital and investment. Bringing these three organisations together, I see what feels like a triumvirate, groups doing similar work, but collaborating to create collective impact.

There are also organisations like the Australian Indigenous Governance Institute, which ensures that the way we do business aligns with the ways Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have been governing themselves for over 85,000 years.

I’ve seen many non-Indigenous organisations seeking to partner with small Aboriginal community-controlled organisations on major projects. That’s really important, because it allows skills and capabilities to be shared, while also creating opportunities for Indigenous organisations to access spaces they might not otherwise reach. I think partnerships with non-Indigenous organisations are key.

They help fill gaps in skills that I might not have, while also allowing us to share cultural knowledge and insights they may not have.

We’re in an exciting time with a real proliferation of Indigenous charities operating in this space. But one of the biggest challenges is that our current business framework (particularly within Supply Nation) doesn’t adequately account for organisations that can’t be “owned.”

The Indigenous Procurement Policy is designed to benefit Aboriginal businesses, but as a Public Benevolent Institution we sit outside of that model. We’ve intentionally chosen this structure because it ensures our communities remain the ultimate beneficiaries. We’re saying, “We can play with the big firms. We can access opportunities and deliver major projects, but we’ll do it while keeping our communities at the centre and making sure profit is reinvested, not directed to shareholders.”

There’s definitely room to improve how Indigenous organisations are supported, especially those that don’t fit neatly into the “51% owned and operated” box. We’re Aboriginal-governed, majority Aboriginal-staffed, and doing the work our communities want us to do. Yet we don’t tick all the bureaucratic boxes. That’s something that needs to change.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I am a bit of an avid reader, although these days it’s mostly government briefs rather than novels. That said, one of my favourite books (and it’s probably a little off-topic) is Holding the Man by the late Australian author Timothy Conigrave.

In many ways, it’s a story that resonates with my own. It’s about a young man in boarding school who comes out to the world as queer and has to navigate what that means for his life. For me, having been separated from community, taken to boarding school, cut off from culture, and then navigating what it meant to come out, I can deeply relate to those identity shifts and challenges.

What makes it powerful is that it’s an Australian story, and it’s a true story. It challenges us to think about who we are, how we fit into this world, and what identity really means. It’s beautifully written and, I think, a book that should resonate with many of us.